I’m wondering if those with either 1) legal experience or 2) experience with concrete things in the past they’ve seen with these type of lawsuits can comment, to help everyone get their heard around the logical impact to stock price, if any.

[Milekic05] (*) Milekic, Slavoljub “User Interface for Removing an Object from a Display”, United States Patent 6,920,619, July 19, 2005
User interface via direct manipulation on a touchscreen: in particular a gesture-like flick (rapid motion) results in object being “thrown away” / deleted rather than being moved around: the recognition of the feature is based on the velocity only, not on shape. Appears to refer to directional gestures with different meanings, but apparently does not describe a recognizer of shapes per se. Other disclosures are about proximity sensing, multi-touch.
Alternate spelling: Slavko Milekichttp://users.erols.com/rwservices/pens/biblio05.html

Apple Inc. AAPL?-2.46% shares continued their descent, extending a decline from an April 10 intraday peak to more than 10%.

That, by some definitions, puts Apple’s shares into a “correction.”

The decline has been swift, taking just nine trading days. Before then, Apple had been up 59% this year, reaching an intraday peak of $644 a share on April 10. The stock has lost $56.5 billion in market value over the past two weeks.

On Friday, shares of the Cupertino, Calif., technology company fell for a third straight day, dropping $14.46, or 2.5%, to $572.98. The stock is down 9.9% since its all-time closing high hit on April 9. It tumbled 5.3% this week, its worst since October, shortly after co-founder Steve Jobs died. Unlike that pullback, however, trading volume in Apple has been roughly double this time around, with an average of 31.6 million shares changing hands each day, according to FactSet.

Many investors said the stock’s stumble is a logical pullback after such a big rise. Analysts and investors who are largely bullish on the company remain, for the most part, sanguine on Apple’s prospects.

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But some also have tempered expectations ahead of the company’s earnings, which are scheduled for Tuesday, and other developments have made investors jittery.

On Friday, Bernstein Research said Apple’s margin forecast for its next fiscal quarter could be more cautious, given the higher manufacturing cost of its latest iPad. A report from research firm NPD Group suggested sluggish growth in the company’s Mac computers. Verizon Communications Inc., whose investors are frustrated by the high costs of offering the iPhone, said it would push alternatives powered by Microsoft Corp. software.

On Thursday, T. Michael Walkley, an analyst at Cannacord Genuity, lowered his estimate for full-year earnings and iPhone sales, citing evidence of “modestly slowing” sales of the latest iPhone.

Even so, he expects sales to pick up at the end of the year, leading him to raise his 52-week price target to $740 from $710.

The company still is expected to report a strong second quarter. Analysts predict earnings of $9.92 a share on revenue of $36.6 billion, according to estimates from Thomson Reuters.

That is up from $6.40 a share and $24.7 billion in sales in the year-earlier quarter.

Longer term, some investors are worried about the company’s product road map. Apple is expected to launch a new iPhone this year. And company executives insist they see plenty of upside for the device given billions of people still don’t own a smartphone. But when or whether it plans to enter any bigger new product categories, such as televisions, remains unclear.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

Traders note that Apple has fallen to its 50-day moving average, an indicator that tracks a stock’s medium-term trend. If Apple drops beneath that level, it could trigger further selling, traders said.

Fans remain bullish.

Mr. Walkley of Cannacord said some of his clients are taking advantage of the decline to buy. “We still think the stock is very attractive,” Mr. Walkley said. “I expect the stock will be higher by year-end.”

Maury Fertig, chief investment officer at Relative Value Partners, a Chicago investment adviser with $650 million in assets, said he isn’t worried.

“We have to put it all in perspective: The big picture is that we’re back to where it was trading a month ago,” he said. Still, “we’re focused on it because it’s such a large part of the market.”

?Tomi Kilgore contributed to this article.
Write to Jonathan Cheng at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and Jessica E. Vascellaro at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Investors got a scare on Monday when Apple, AAPL?-2.46% among the best-performing stocks of 2012, tumbled 4.2%, capping a five-day stretch during which it lost 8.8%. The stock continued its slide later in the week, finishing Friday down 10% from its all-time high.

Apple stock now dominates the Nasdaq index and holds outsized influence even on the S&P 500. With the stock now slumping, investors face big risks. Benjamin Levisohn on The News Hub explains how to limit your exposure to Apple. Photo: AP.

You didn’t have to own a single share to feel the pain. That is because Apple, the largest public company in the U.S., now makes up more than 4% of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index and almost 18% of the Nasdaq-100. On some trading days, Apple alone can determine whether broad stock indexes are up or down. On Monday, for instance, the Nasdaq fell 1.1%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which doesn’t include Apple, rose 0.6%. On Friday, Apple fell 2.5%, sending the Nasdaq down 0.4% even as the Dow rose 0.5%.

Making matters trickier, a broad swath of mutual funds have been piling into Apple shares of late?even funds dedicated to such specialties as small-company and emerging-market stocks. The result can be what experts call “concentration risk,” or too big a position in a single stock.

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Glen Gustafson
The good news is that there are ways to reduce this risk. By sticking to broader market indexes, choosing alternatives to traditional market-capitalization-weighted mutual funds and investing in other companies that benefit from Apple’s growth, you can cut back on Apple and still prosper if the stock continues to rise.

“Apple’s had an amazing run,” says Barry Knapp, chief equity strategist at Barclays Capital in New York. But “once a stock gets to this level of contribution, you have to think about its effect on markets.”

Pricey? Cheap? Who Cares?
It isn’t clear whether Apple, at $573 per share, is over- or underpriced. Depending on the valuation measure used, different investors can come to different conclusions.

Some companies that previously reigned as the largest in the S&P 500 got there because of irrational exuberance. Cisco Systems, CSCO?+0.03% for example, saw its price/earnings ratio, a measure of valuation, swell to well over 100 at the stock’s peak in 2000?versus the S&P 500’s average P/E of about 25 at the time.

Apple is another story. Since it rolled out the iPhone in 2007, its P/E has shrunk, notes Horace Dediu, a former telecom analyst at Nokia NOK?-3.14% and founder of Asymco, a data-analysis firm in Helsinki. In 2007, Apple’s P/E based on the next 12 months of earnings was about 30; now it is about 12.8, compared with the S&P 500’s average of 12.5.

During that same period, Apple’s stock price has soared sevenfold?but its profits have increased by 1,200%.

One reason why Apple’s P/E is so reasonable, experts say, is that the technology sector is especially fickle, and investors are unsure of future profits. “This is a technology company in a world where technology changes quickly,” says John Goltermann, a portfolio manager at Obermeyer Asset Management in Aspen, Colo. “Now, it’s the incumbent, but that’s not necessarily going to be the case forever.”

Purely from a portfolio-management standpoint, however, whether or not Apple is overvalued is largely irrelevant. What matters is how much the company dominates your overall holdings.

Associated Press
Whether or not Apple is overvalued is irrelevant.

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Experts typically recommend putting no more than 5% of a portfolio in any one company. While that might mean giving up some of the gains of a highflying stock, it protects against bigger losses should that stock crash.

Yet many investors aren’t heeding that advice. Financial planner Bruce Primeau of Summit Wealth Advocates in Prior Lake, Minn., says he just brought on a client who has almost 20% of his portfolio in Apple stock, which the client plans to manage by himself, outside of Mr. Primeau’s purview. Mr. Primeau says he is trying to convince the client to diversify out of the holding, but has had little success so far.

“I can run retirement projections until the cows come home” on the rest of the portfolio, he says. “But no matter what I do, Apple is going to have the most significant impact.”

Outsize Influence
History hasn’t been kind to companies that dominate the S&P 500 to the extent that Apple now does. Since 1990, four other companies have comprised 4% or more of the index, according to the Leuthold Group: Microsoft MSFT?+4.55% in January 1999, General Electric GE?+1.15% in December 1999, Cisco in March 2000 and Exxon Mobil XOM?+0.02% in April 2008. None of them stayed at that level for more than one year. Apple crossed that threshold in February and remains there now.

“It’s always been a good long-term sell signal,” says Doug Ramsey, chief investment officer at Leuthold Weeden Capital Management. “Companies haven’t been able to sustain that position for long.”

Even lesser levels of dominance can be unsustainable, notes Feifei Li, head of research at Research Affiliates. According to the firm, between 1952 and 2010, companies that led their sector in market capitalization have underperformed their sector by 3.2% per year for the next decade. Since the middle of 2007, meanwhile, 26 of the 100 largest companies in the S&P 500 have dropped out of the top 100, according to Leuthold Group data.

“The Big Money managers’ favorite stocks are an eclectic bunch, and include Apple (ticker: AAPL), Bank of America (BAC), Microsoft (MSFT), and Corning Glass (GLW), among others. Apple is also the stock the pros consider most overvalued. Shares have rallied more than 500% in the past five years, but fell 5.3% last week, to $572.98.

David Ware, president of Barrington Capital Management in suburban Chicago, is an Apple fan, noting shares aren’t expensive at 14 times this fiscal year’s expected earnings. Moreover, “Apple’s technology is so far ahead of the competition that it is going to take a year or more for [rivals] to compete with the iPhone and the iPad,” he says.

Others think the company and its shares have come too far too fast, raising expectations that won’t be met. “Apple’s breathtaking growth has been extrapolated to the point where they will have to achieve the same success with each new product that they enjoyed with the iPhone and iPad,” says Jason Hsu, chief investment officer with Research Affiliates in Newport Beach, Calif. “There are a lot of potential bumps in the road.”

History shows that companies like Apple, which show remarkable growth in sales and earnings, subsequently underperform because stocks get ahead of themselves, he adds.”